Born out of necessity to provide high quality accounting and financial services to local Indigenous businesses and community groups, iBase has seen some impressive growth over the years. In addition to providing innovative accounting solutions, iBase has been working towards digitising their record keeping to minimise the usage of paper in their organisation.

According to the National Waste Report, 2018, the decline of newspaper circulation and the digitisation of information was partially responsible for a decline in the amount of paper and cardboard waste that ended up in Australian landfills over the last decade (Industry Edge 2018). ‘At this point, we can’t go fully paperless.’ Said David Selvendra, founder and Business Services Manager of iBase. ‘This is not going to be an overnight change but a long-term journey towards predominantly digitised record keeping and communication’.

In addition to the obvious environmental benefits, going digital has proven to be beneficial for iBase in many other areas. In addition to reducing clutter and storage requirements and the ability to make updates with ease, essential client information and other details have also gained mobility which is especially important as iBase accountants often have to travel to service their clients.

David and his team has managed to gradually implement digitised documentation over the past couple of year. As of now, iBase operations are almost 80% paperless. With readily available software features such as Adobe Acrobat’s ‘fill and sign’, the practice of printing forms to complete them is approaching obsolescence.

‘In our case, our skilled staff members made the process much easier’, said David. ‘However, with computers becoming more and more user-friendly and accessible, anyone who is able to print a document is most certainly capable of filling out a form and using an e-signature on a form, which is the very first step of making printing obsolete’